


A Bastard's Work is Never Done

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Belts, Bloodplay, Bondage, Bounty Hunters, Breathplay, Knifeplay, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-14 17:30:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14774039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Warren tries to teach him better, but that just complicates matters.





	A Bastard's Work is Never Done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



The thing was, he would have done it for free. Had done it for free. But there was some extra significance, an ocean of significance, in getting paid for it.

So while it wasn’t any kind of special hardship, hunting bounties and turning them into Red Rock to pay down their debt to the town, the situation rankled him, as a matter of principle. All those bodies worth a fortune littering the floors of Minnie’s had slipped through their fingers, become change lining some other asshole’s pockets. The asshole being a hard-fisted, blizzard-braving bastard of a lucky traveler who’d claimed every last late member of the Domingre Gang for himself (and Warren’s three corpses he’d had in the first place) in exchange for safe passage down the mountain before they froze to death. Warren suspected that if he’d been awake for that part of things, he might have tricked him into a better deal. For all that tough talking Mannix had done to get himself on O.B.’s stagecoach, his bargaining skills sure abandoned him when it came to hanging onto even one corpse to put towards the doctoring and boarding bills.

“I swear, you act like I sold them for magic beans, not your damn life. You know he could have just taken the bodies and left us for dead. _Would_ have done if I hadn’t convinced him he needed a living, breathing bounty hunter to cash them in. That’s me saving your life out of nothing but the goodness of my heart.”

Mannix not having any goodness in his heart showed that for the line of bullshit it was. Still, he didn’t like to think too much about why Mannix really had saved him. Just like how he didn’t like thinking about why he’d agreed to take a partner again, after he swore he was done with that shit for good. Hard times made a man agreeable to things he’d never consider under better circumstances, and wasn’t that the whole story of his acquaintance with Chris Mannix.

Still, he’d forgotten how much easier it could be, hunting with someone else. It was nice, too, having someone to give a low whistle when he made a good shot or came up with a particularly ruthless scheme to trick someone into their crosshairs. He followed orders, too, at least until Warren reminded him that that’s what he was doing. Then he’d go into a white boy funk where he’d be quarrelsome just to prove he still could. The first time he tried that, Warren just calmly got up early the next morning and rode off without him. It took the better part of four days for Mannix to track him down. He came into camp, jerked his head up in greeting like he’d been expected. Silently offered a dozen pillaged eggs by way of apology, and some actually useful reconnaissance on the Ross Flat gang holed up nearby. Warren finished his pemmican, and wiped his fingers off slowly, enjoying the way Mannix stood, chewing on his lips, face an appealing shade of pink, waiting for Warren’s forgiveness.

“I suppose I was getting tired of pemmican anyhow,” he said.

After that, they’d mostly stuck together.

Which brought them up to the present, and to Warren wondering if maybe sticking together hadn’t been the wrong idea. Things had gotten weird in Cheyenne.

Joel Hartley had holed up in a fussy little Cheyenne hotel under an assumed name, and had apparently built up enough funds in his long train-robbing career that he saw no reason to ever leave. Being practically next door to the governor’s mansion and having certain aspirations towards respectability, the hotel was always prissy about firearms, and made especially sure that a black man and anyone he was traveling with were thoroughly disarmed at the door.

“How we gonna kill him without even a knife between us?” Mannix whispered.

Like Warren hadn’t killed more men during the war with nothing in his possession but a broken-off matchstick than most men will in a lifetime. Plus, as he reminded Mannix, he had the Lincoln Letter. Hartley might be a murdering sonofabitch, but he’d been a lieutenant once, and he still got misty-eyed talking about defending Gettysburg with his old Pennsylvania regiment.

So Warren talked his way into the hotel on the strength of that Union coat and a few dropped hints about the piece of paper he kept close to his heart. It took two nights before he engaged Hartley directly in conversation, then another night before Hartley condescended to drink with him. Mannix sat a few booths away, drinking and doing a poor job of blending in, especially when Warren’d crack some joke that would set Hartley laughing and slapping his back and his face would turn the shade of sour milk.

The truth was, sanguine as Warren was about killing the man, Hartley was almost better company than Mannix. Their regiments really had been almost side-by-side at the Battle of Atlanta, and the two of them really were exchanging true war stories by then, with some necessary embellishments on Warren’s part to account for how his heroism had caught the attention of the president himself. He might have dragged the whole thing out a bit longer than he strictly needed to, because watching Mannix shoot him wounded looks from across the bar while they reminisced about burning this plantation or that to cinders was an experience too funny to not dwell on. Even if Hartley wasn’t better company than Mannix, there was some perverse pleasure in convincing Mannix it was so.

At the end of the night, no one batted an eye when two old Union men in blue uniforms, white fellow stumbling from drink, went upstairs to continue their conversation over a game of cards. And no one heard a damn thing, a few hours later, when Warren got his belt off and strangled him from behind while Hartley snoozed in his chair.

“Serves him fucking right,” Mannix said, slipping in afterward, spitting in the general direction of the body and coming up well short. Mannix’s little stretches of Southern boy scruples were the most tiresome thing about him, even if torturing him with them presented some occasional bright spots in his day.

“That was just business, white boy. If I was serving folks right, it’d be you dead instead of him.”

Mannix scoffed. “Like you ever needed dollar signs attached to a white man’s head to kill him, you set your mind to it.”

Which Warren had to concede, not least because he liked that implicit little admission slipped in there, that Warren could kill Mannix if he really wanted to do it, which was a kind of flattery, looked at right.

Mannix’s face puckered as he watched Warren unloop his belt from the white man’s neck. Warren recalled that while he'd been faking getting drunk, Mannix had had nothing to do but get the real thing. His eyes were unfocused, but he scowled at that belt like it'd personally betrayed him. “You being as close as you were down there, I can't say I'm surprised you got half-undressed for him,” he said, then went pink in the cheeks. Warren looked at him long and hard.

“You jealous, Chris?”

“No, goddammit. I just mean it’s a familiarity he didn’t des—“ He trailed off. “Nevermind.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing you could dismiss with a nevermind, though. He looked at Mannix, smelled the whiskey on him. He was swaying a bit on his feet. He would have been useless as backup, if he'd needed it.

“I think you already spent your share of this bounty at the bar. Why this got you so riled up, anyhow?”

“Atlanta, for one.”

Warren snorted. "That ain't what I mean."

And to investigate further, he took a few steps towards Mannix, black leather belt, shiny as the day he’d bought it, still dangling by his side. Mannix’s eyes focused on that, and widened. Warren smirked, then raised the loop of the belt, brushed it against his cheek. Mannix flinched away.

“What the fuck was that supposed to be?”

“Nothing, Chris,” he said, slinging his belt back through his belt loops and buckling it up. "Nothing at all."

Mannix knelt by Hartley. “You know he liked you cause he thought that bullshit letter of yours was genuine.”

“Yeah, that’s how the scheme works.”

“I’m just saying. Him and John Ruth and all those other self-righteous Yankee _ass_ holes. They only like you cause of who they think you are. I’m the one that knows you’re a miserable lying bastard and I still—” he drifted off, words skittering away from him like marbles.

“No, go on Chris. You what?”

“Well, I’m still here, ain’t I?”

“Until I get sick of your bullshit, sure." And that briefly seemed to be the end of it. They got paid, though the prissy hotel was sore as fuck about them executing their best paying customer, so they had to clear out and sleep on the plains that night. They didn’t talk about Chris's fit any that night, or any of the next few nights. Soon after, they hightailed it out of the southern part of the state, went back to the mountains where hunting was always better.

The next thing of note happened when they got in over their heads near Stinking Water Gulch. Five men against the two of them, converging in a little shotgun shack near the creek.

Mannix, for his part, killed two right off the bat. Warren’d just finished dispatching the second-to-last with his final bullet. He’d turned around and found the very last bastard had got Mannix pinned up against the wall, had his hands around Mannix’s throat and was squeezing the life out of him.

Warren hadn't thought about it, just moved. He came up behind him and drew a knife across his throat. Sometimes a man with a slit throat would belch up blood, languid and slow, but sometimes it’d spray out like there was pressure built up behind it, and this fellow did the second. He sprayed blood everywhere, covering Mannix in particular. His face all red but for his eyes, blinking white and surprised a moment later.

That had been the first frisson of something between them, watching that body quiver and jerk between them, while the man’s hands grasped wordlessly at Mannix’s neck for a second more. Looking back, it made him feel a bit better, knowing that the first proper hard-on they got in front of each other, they got with some mean bastard in between them. It felt better, proper, having that barrier.  
  
But a dead man can’t stay on his feet forever, and eventually he crumpled and slid to the ground between them, and there was nothing blocking out the view of Mannix’s blood-drenched face, red as if someone'd flayed him.  
  
He locked bright wild eyes with Warren, broke into a stupid grin, then let out a goddamn rebel yell right in Warren’s fucking face, like he’d forgotten who he was, who they were to each other.  
  
Warren was still holding that knife, and without thinking, he raised it to Mannix’s throat. That wiped that grin off his face, a funny look of genuine worry skittering across that face, followed a moment later by a different kind of realization. Mannix might not have a goddamn clue, but he was quick-witted when he wanted to be.

“Now major, you ain’t gonna save my life just to end it over a little thing like that?”  
  
“I’m thinking it over.”  
  
But that would have been the least interesting thing he could do to him. Especially with that electricity-charged air that seemed to be jumping between them, like the battle they’d just fought had left a lightning storm in its wake. He wasn’t reacting like any sort of normal man with a knife to his throat, not that Warren had expected him to. That damn grin was gone, replaced with something unreadable. He raised his chin; adam’s apple bobbing up, like a challenge or an invitation.  
  
It gave him a nice view of the bruises that were springing up, so dark they were visible even under that coating of blood. He wished, suddenly, that he’d put them there. It seemed wrong that Chris should be marked up so intimately by anyone but him.  
  
Warren put the knife to his neck, traced it down to his collarbone, let the knife clear a path through the blood on his throat, revealing a thin trail of unblemished white skin. Doing the opposite of what a knife should. In the hollow of his throat, he tested how far that skin of his would give under the pressure of the blade without breaking. He wondered why he’d ever fucked around shoving a knife against Joe Gage’s throat, when Chris was right there, pliant and pretty and just begging for it.  
  
Moved by the same mysterious instincts that guide an artist’s hand, he drew the blade across his throat. Mannix did flinch at that, but not much. It was a shallow cut, no worse than a man might give himself shaving.  
  
Warren lifted that bloody blade, a mix now of Mannix’s and the dead man’s, and he lifted it up to Mannix’s lips.

And Mannix blanched. He let his eyes go dark and unfocused. Warren could practically see what he wanted to do in his mind's eye, his lips closing around the blade, tentatively tonguing the flat of the knife, covering his lips and tongue with it and then licking till Warren's knife was clean again.  
  
He would swear, later, he had seen Mannix ready for it.  His lips parted. Then he chickened out. Started babbling. “I never seen a man so excited by killing. You’ve got unnatural tastes, major,” he said, like Warren couldn’t see the hard-on he was sporting from this angle, sticking out like a club from his own trousers. He turned his bloody face away from Warren. He wondered if this was sometimes how he looked after his raids with the Marauders, bloody face as well as bloody hands; so much blood spilled a man could drown in it. The thought made him press the knife sharp into the soft underside of Mannix’s chin. Mannix yelped, rubbed his neck and glared up at Warren.

Warren let him go, shoving him towards the bodies and telling him to work.

Mannix scowled after him for a long time.

_

 

It was a weird situation, and he wasn’t sure he liked having this, whatever it was, lie unresolved between them.

But it came to a head sooner than he expected. They were already heading into summer, and it was getting warm enough most nights that Warren could strip down to one layer of long johns, which he did tonight. The air was thick and humid, like a storm was coming. He stretched out and stared up at the sky and closed his eyes almost immediately.

He could still hear Mannix rustling around. White boy made a point of rolling out his bedroll well away from Warren and the campfire, on the other side of a patch of scrub bushes. Warren didn’t object to the distance. He could use some distance from Mannix's bullshit, and with that thought he drifted off to sleep.

Something woke him up a few hours later, when the mountain air had cooled and the fire had burned down to almost nothing. He laid still, annoyed, trying to work out what it was that had disturbed him when he couldn't see why anything should have. The hairs at the back of his neck weren’t tingling, but all the same, something had woke him up. A scan of the campsite showed nothing out of order. He had strung up a line between the trees and hung his clothes up out of some need to keep everything clean and creased the way he liked. He looked again at them. Something seemed off about them, now that he thought about it. It took a few moments to work out that a piece was missing. His belt was gone from the line. Wasn’t on the ground, either.

That was strange enough that he woke up the whole rest of the way. He listened, but heard nothing but the sounds of the wilderness. Then he caught a small, muffled sound, coming from over on Mannix’s side of the scrub brush.

He got up fast. He still knew how to move silently through the dark, and he did so now.

On the other side of the scrub brush was Chris Mannix’s bedroll, and Chris Mannix lying on his back with the covers kicked off. He was a sight. His pants down around his knees, thighs fishbelly white in the moonlight, eyes closed tight, one hand working his cock hard and fast.

And he’d found his belt, too.

Mannix had looped it around his own neck, cinched and pulled tight. His face was dark and flushed up, the same angry shade as his cock. A few high small sounds escape his lips, about all that could make it through the leather pulled across his throat. His hand pumped vigorously, then slowed like he wanted to savor it, hips thrusting up to meet his own strokes. All in all, it was a pretty shameful display of self-abuse.

He watched for a minute, Mannix apparently so caught up he didn’t sense he had an audience. He’d caught sight of Mannix’s pecker before. It was difficult not to when they’d kept as close quarters as they had the past few months, but he’d never seen it hard. It was sort of interesting in its own right, though not as interesting as the whole picture of him, and the shameful story it told. It was a damn hard thing not to laugh. Like he didn’t have his own goddamn belt. Like he was still so consumed with jealousy or just plain need he’d burst out of his skin if he didn’t get Warren’s belt around his own neck right then and there, out in the middle of nowhere.

It was pretty damn hilarious, was what it was.

He sidled up quietly, waited until moments before what he figured for Mannix’s climax, then pressed a boot on both Mannix’s hand and his cock. Then he about laughed himself hoarse at the sight of Mannix starting up wildly, thrashing around. A second later he was bent over, trying to shove his still hard prick back in his pants. “What the shitfire _fuck,_ you black bastard _._  That ain’t any kind of polite thing to do.”

“I don't think a man in your state's fit to lecture anyone on polite behavior.”

“Well, a man’s got to tend to his own needs out here, don't he?” he snapped. “The polite thing would be for not to call attention to it. Ain’t like we've even been in the _fucking_ vicinity of a whorehouse lately.”

“I think you got some needs they'd charge you extra for." He stepped closer. Mannix's hard-on hadn't flagged a bit, that much was plain to see. Felt Mannix’s breathing quicken and smelled the sweat on him, sharp with fear. “Or maybe they can’t help you at all.”

Mannix just about leaned in to him, his belt still hanging loose around his neck. Warren reached and pulled it loose, Mannix breathing short and fast as the leather slid free of his neck.

He grinned, to match Mannix's scowl.

“But we're getting sidetracked. The whole point, the reason you got caught with your pants down, is you took something of mine without asking. Now, since that’s something of a tradition where you were raised, I should have expected that. But someone needs to teach you better, and I suppose that falls to me.”

Mannix’s mouth formed a little o. He looked like he meant to run, but had forgotten how. Forgotten how to do much of anything, except gape and open and close his fists.

“Turn around, Chris.”

Wide eyes told him he really hadn’t planned this. Good.

Also good: he did as he was told, moving like obeying caused him some physical pain, but did it just the same.

“Major—“

“Bend over. Hands and knees-like.”

He kept throwing nervous glances back over his shoulder, but he got down on his knees as instructed, bowed his head. “Like that, sir?” Mannix said, and he seemed to have found his brains, voice low and measured like he was doling it out by the teaspoon. Practically dipped that “sir” in dark honey, it was so sweet. Laid on a bit thick, but Warren decided he liked it.

“Just one more thing.”

He reached down to Mannix’s pants, felt that boy's stomach fluttered as he got his pants unbuttoned and tugged them down around his knees, shoved his shirt up. Chris Mannix’s ass turned out to be one of those rare things he had to recommend him: well-muscled, tight, round, and offered up for him, and there weren’t so many appealing sights in the badlands that he didn’t want to take his time enjoying this one.

Warren touched him where his thigh met his backside, felt the muscles tense under his hand. He was liking the way he trembled, gooseflesh rising on his skin despite the warm weather.

“You get yourself whipped during the war?”

“Never did anything my side would want to whip me for, unlike some people.”

“Is mouthing really what you want to be doing right now?”

Warren brought the belt down, laid a sharp neat line across his ass to punctuate the point. Mannix, maybe expecting more of a warm-up, about jumped out of his skin. He dropped his head, ground his teeth.

“No, sir.”

He took his time after that, tried to keep things even on both sides, going slow and almost gentle for a bit, then picking up and laying down the strap in the same place several times in quick succession. It was dark, but still light enough to see some color rising on his skin after a while. His knees were on the bedroll, but at some point Mannix’s hands had slipped off, fingers curling into the dirt and pebbles.

Mannix was right about life on the road being lonesome. He hadn’t had anyone since well before Minnie’s. Almost getting your balls blown off made a man averse to certain pastimes one once enjoyed. But he wasn’t a clueless white boy like Mannix, so he saw no sense in pretending that was why he was enjoying this as much as he was. Enjoying this more than he’d enjoyed having, hell, anyone, since Chester Charles Smithers. There wasn’t any mystery about why. If anything, it seemed to solve a mystery, break open the last few months of this weird-as-fuck partnership and show the insides for what they really were, logical and inevitable as clockwork.

He stroked his ass for a moment, coasting his palm over the surface, feeling the heat radiate off the welts already asserting themselves, rising up proud on his skin.

“You’re burning up, white boy.”

“Well,” said Mannix, tightly, between shallow breaths, “You are the expert on burning up white boys.”

Warren found himself charmed by that, in spite of himself. Maybe not entirely logical, then. “You got that right,” he said, and his thumb slipped down between his ass cheeks, found that tight hole and stroked it. Mannix bucked backwards before he could even hide how much he liked that.

He kneeled down behind Mannix, one knee on either side of his legs. Took his time, made sure the wool and brass buttons of his trousers brushed up against Mannix’s sore ass, so he could have no doubt about what was coming next. Even still, he jumped about half a foot when he felt the weight of Warren’s cock pressed against one of those pretty welts. There was no disguising himself, though, because Warren got his hand around his cock and felt it just about leap in his hand, fully at attention.

He rubbed his cock all over that raw ass, teased him with it. Mannix kept bumping back up against him, even though his backside must have hurt with every touch. Pushed his cheeks together around his cock and rubbed himself between them (and who’d have thought Mannix would have enough ass for that to even be possible?) Then he dipped down and slipped his cock between his legs, bumping lazily against his balls, which seemed to drive Mannix a whole different kind of wild. He thought that Mannix probably would let him fuck his ass then and there, but it seemed like an indulgence, given the circumstances. Instead, he gripped his hips and pressing his thumbs into the reddest part of his cheeks, forced those legs together until he gave him enough friction to work with. He rocked his hips, finding some kind of rhythm that worked for him. Thought again about Chris Mannix spread out under the stars, his belt choking the breath out of him, stiff leather against a soft throat.

“Your daddy use a belt on you?”

“Fuck, major,” Mannix snapped, lowering his head till his forehead was almost in the dirt. “And, no, goddamn you. He was a hickory switch man.”

“Think that’s why his lessons didn’t stick so well? All this time, he was just using the wrong instrument?”

Mannix sighed, like he didn’t even want to dignify that with a response, then sucked in his breath sharply as Warren landed a final blow across his upper ass.

Mannix panted, face in the dirt, like if he buried his face as low as he could he’d disappear, or at least make up for how shamefully high in the air his ass was. Warren stroked those welts with the rough callouses of his thumbs. He didn’t last as long as he would have liked.

After his head had cleared, he realized he’d been too distracted to notice, or care, that Mannix’s hand had slipped between his legs and he was pumping himself with a kind of hopeless desperation, several shades past dignity. His shirt had ridden up to his shoulder blades, and Warren watched those lean muscles shift under his skin as his arm jerked.

Warren’s attention returned to the belt in his hand. He considered that he might just be undoing everything he’d just tried to beat into him, then decided to do it anyway.

He took it in both hands, dragged it around Mannix’s neck and tightened. Mannix’s whole body tensed, his arm jerked harder, and he came with a humiliating gasp, whole body shaking and trembling.

He took the leather away for good, and pushed himself up and off Mannix. “Let’s hope that lesson sticks better than your daddy’s hickory switch lessons.”

Mannix scrubbed his hands through his hair. He was looking up at him, not hateful or vengeful or anything like he expected. More curious than anything. Like he was working something out for himself, and Warren's face held the final part of the puzzle.

"I wouldn't hold out much hope for that; you teach a hell of a muddled lesson."

  
_

 

“You should start paying me equal.” Mannix sat down in the shade beside him. It was shaping up to be a hot day. He’d perked up a bit in the sunlight, like a daisy, and that moodiness that characterized him in the early morning hours was long gone.

“Little late to reopen negotiations.”

“Well, why not? Besides, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. I’m damn useful to you and you know it. And it ain’t like you’re really doing this shit for the money.”

“Yeah? What am I doing it for, then?”

Mannix grinned at him. “Same reason you do everything. The sheer bastard meanness of it.”

The thing was, Mannix was right enough. He wasn’t doing it for the money. He never intended to stop. Not once that his debt to Red Rock was paid off, and not when he finally had saved up enough for himself that he could have bought up a little parcel of land somewhere, live out his days in Mexico or Canada or anywhere else. He did this because he liked it, because the sweet irony of getting paid to peddle in white men’s flesh by other white men was more pleasure than he could bear sometimes. And how many men could say they’d found a true calling in life?

“And how about you, Mannix? Why are you doing what you’re doing?”

He'd watched Mannix mull the question over in his head the past few days, and was really curious as to the answer. At first, he half-expected Chris to find his balls and his misplaced Southern pride and strike back at him.

But apart from being a bit more subdued than usual, he didn't. Didn't even try to pretend it hadn't happened, which was the very next thing he'd been expecting. When he didn't do that any, either, he figured Mannix had found some hare-brained way of justifying it all to himself in his mind. He still remembered that speech he’d given to Daisy, back at Minnie’s. Any son of the South who managed to spin his choice to side with a notorious cracker-killing black man into a personal paeon of loyalty to his dead rebel daddy and his army had to be a regular genius at twisting things around into some more acceptable shape in his head.

It would have been more comfortable for both of them if he had spewed a line of bullshit in that vein. Instead, Mannix just frowned into the fire. Looked kind of appealing, with his mouth turned down and his eyes serious. “Well, I ain’t figured that out yet.”

 

-

 

But things really took a turn a week later, when they were staying in the clapboard shack of the late Lyle Sweetwater, bushwacker and all-around no-account rotten-toothed hillbilly ("some cousin of yours?" Warren whispered to Mannix) who they’d dragged around back after shooting him down during suppertime.

He used the belt again on Mannix, but he changed it up this time. Got hold of his wrists, wrapped the belt around them tight. Once his hands were secure behind his back, Warren pushed him down on his knees, grabbed his hair and tilted his head back to look at him. Made him take his cock in his mouth, without having to worry about Mannix getting distracted stroking himself liked he'd done before. He found he liked looking at him in that position, shoulders forced wide and throat bared, real defenseless. Getting him tied up like that was good for frustrating Mannix, and good too because he didn't seem to like it. Apparently it wasn’t just pride made him disinclined to ride to Red Rock in chains. But he seemed to like proving he could bear it without struggling too much, which was its own kind of entertainment.

After a minute of sucking, he got Mannix bent over the table, his pants down, which elicited one hell of a moan all on its own. He stood back, looking to see the progress of the bruises he'd laid there. The red had faded, the welts not standing proud anymore, but a few nice purple bruises remained, dark and vivid. Warren reacquainted himself with the shape of them. He brought his thumb to Mannix's mouth, got it slicked nice and wet, then traced his thumb around his hole.

He didn't want to be overly generous, didn’t want him to get the idea he cared, so some spit and his thumb was all he got. In the future, he thought, he really should make Mannix do the work himself, get him half-doubled over in bed or on the ground, hand between his legs working his hole with his own fingers till his hand was cramping and he was begging and cussing for Warren to let him stop and give him his cock.

He felt that tight ass squeezing around him. Bringing him back to the present. He pulled his thumb out. Slapped him across the ass.

"This is a fucked up fixation of yours, major," Mannix said. He was never quite sweet, never quite easy. Sharp enough to give Warren some special pleasure in getting himself lined up at his hole and pushing in hard, feeling Mannix helpless to do anything but take him in, tighter than just about anyone he'd ever fucked. He fucked him lazily, the bonds holding Mannix in place a nice tangible reminder whose pace they were moving at, and who was going to be bent over the table however long it took. 

Out of sheer curiosity, he reached down Mannix’s front, stroked the head of his cock, felt the spot where his hard cock touched his belly, wetness already running down in a stream.

Mannix liked that so much he bucked into his hand, a lazy bump, almost friendly-like.

“Hold off, white boy,” he murmured, amused in spite of himself. “You’re so excited you’re leaking.”

“Like it doesn’t flatter you all to hell.”

Well, no point in denying that. Suddenly feeling uncommonly friendly, he kept his hand there, stroked him. He hadn’t bothered to do this for Mannix before, hadn't seen the need, but there was something to be said for it. The plain, naked need beneath his hands; knowing he could steer it wherever he wanted, towards relief or ruin. He rubbed the calloused pad of his thumb over his slit. He felt Mannix's hands, still trapped, fluttering helplessly between them, and he hitched Mannix up closer to him, and kicked his legs wider apart. Wanting to get deeper, split him apart from the inside out, fuck him up and leave marks no one else could ever get at, which was what he was thinking when he came. Which should have been the end of it, but somehow wasn't, because even after, he stayed inside him and kept lazily jerking Mannix's cock till he finished him off.

Some time after, he got Mannix untied and cleaned himself up. He later couldn't recall a damn thing about dinner, except afterward he pushed Mannix up against the wall and forced his mouth open, and kissed him hard, because he didn’t have it in him to fuck his face, but it seemed suddenly important to him to bruise up his lips anyway.

After that, he turned in. There was only one bed, and it wasn't big. But he didn’t raise up any objection when he heard the straw in the matterss crackle and the weight of the bed shift, felt a body slide in beside him. He must have been in a good mood, because he didn't even object when Mannix put a hand on his back, ran it down his spine.

“Where you from anyhow, major?”

Mannix got these funny unguarded moments where he forgot who Warren was and tried to talk to him like he would have a white man: inane, easy chit-chat, like dredging up the past wasn’t crossing into no-man's land between them.

He didn’t know why, but this time, he indulged Mannix. “Louisiana.”

Mannix knitted his eyebrows together. “You don’t talk like any Louisiana man I ever met.”

“I outran the state and the whole South, you don’t think I could outrun the accent if I really wanted to?”

“I suppose that’s so,” said Mannix, rolling over on his stomach and reaching to roll a cigarette on his pillow, like a philistine. He didn’t seem at all self-conscious about Warren talking about his past. “When’d you run?”

“Sixteen.” Didn’t know why he was inclined to answer with similar casualness, when he’d never spoken with a white man about it at all, at least not without burnishing it up with some sheen, spinning it into some larger story that served the ends of making himself whoever he needed to be to get by.

“Major Marquis Warren at sixteen. You know, that is a hard thing to picture.”

Hard, or maybe he just didn’t want to, since he very much doubted Mannix didn't know what a skinny black boy running for his life looked like. Sometimes it seemed like the one right and moral thing he still might do with his life was to see Mannix in the ground. But he’d never been overly troubled with doing anything right and moral, and it didn’t look like he was going to start now. Mannix wasn’t one to be troubled by his conscience either, but sometimes, like right now, he seemed able to follow the train of Warren’s thought and realize… something. He finished rolling his cigarette and put it in his mouth with a sort of serious expression, like he was thinking thoughts that were new to him and not to his liking.

Finally he said, real level, “I wasn’t even Marquis Warren then, let alone Major.”

Mannix nodded, chewed the thought over. “I suppose that’s so. Where’d you get Warren from, anyhow? I know it wasn’t from some white man.”

“Sure it was. First man I ever killed.”

A small, fond smile threatened to upturn Mannix’s mouth. “Now that does sound like you.”

Warren watched him take a drag from his cigarette, and wondered when that smell had become as comfortingly familiar as his own pipe tobacco.

“Damn. You killed a man for his name?”

“I killed him cause we crossed paths and he was going to turn me in. I just took his name afterward, and his horse too, since he wasn’t going to be using them.”

“You been a real bastard a long time.”

“And I’m always getting better at it.”

If he lived to be a hundred, he wouldn’t forget that feeling of winning that fight, of watching a man’s life drain out of him, his face saying clearly with every dying gasp that this wasn’t how it was supposed to end between them, not one bit. As he sat on the ground next to the dead man, blood under his fingernails, breathless and half-hard, he had felt he suddenly understood America. This was what freedom was. Killing, then riding where you wanted to go and no one stopping you from doing either. No wonder white men loved this country so much.

He told Mannix some of that, and Mannix soaked it up, flashes of reproach crossing that face like fast-moving clouds across the Wyoming plains, but fondness too, that weird fondness he'd never known how to figure on, and afterwards he just lay there smoking and looking half-thoughtful.

After, a long sleepy silence in which neither of them said anything. Then Mannix had to bring up business.

“I suppose it's too much, hoping you'll rethink splitting things evenly with me,” he said. "But you could at least admit you're best at hunting with me. You got to admit."

"I don't know about that."

"Sure you are. And I'll tell you why. You like having someone who knows how good you are at all of it. The killing and the Lincoln letter. You like having someone knows all you done and exactly what kind of a bastard you are," Mannix stretched, like a cat that found its spot in the sun. "Just tell me I'm wrong."

Warren snorted. He reached over and plucked the cigarette out of his mouth and took a long drag from it. Mannix gave it up wordlessly, but his mouth looked kind of empty without it, so he slipped a finger between his lips to improve the picture some. Mannix closed his mouth around it and sucked on it, contentedly, like the switch didn't bother him any.

“Maybe not all wrong.”


End file.
